


Cabbages and Kings

by rapacityinblue



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, story fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:40:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rapacityinblue/pseuds/rapacityinblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Grimglass, Mildmay pieces together what's happened in Melusine over the last few years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cabbages and Kings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosethornli](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosethornli/gifts).



Here's the thing no one tells you about Grimglass: It's small. And not small, like people from Melusine say St. Mellifleur is small, like they've got a bug up their ass about it. Small like walk there before you can even say diligence, let alone get one. Tiny. 

And, you know, that was great for Felix, with his lighthouse full of hocus papers, and it was great for Kay, because I guess he felt useful and I couldn't grudge him it. And for a while I even thought they'd start something up, on account of them both being molly, and Kethe, do I realize how stupid that sounds. Because Felix and Kay, even both happy, they couldn't be in the same room together for more'n ten minutes before they started baiting. It really didn't matter which way it went, you knew it was going to be a grade a fuck-up before too long. 

And besides, Felix had that thing with the Duke of Murtagh, that we all pretended not to know about. But every time the Duke came out to Grimglass to "check on things," which as near as I could tell meant bitch to Kay about his duchess, he and Felix'd both come out of their rooms grinning ear-to-ear in the morning. And you could tell, how they thought they were being subtle about it, but they weren't, and it seemed to make them both happy. Which is all I needed to know, and way more than I wanted to. 

Sometimes things were still bad, especially when Corbie sent along all those Mulkist writings about the Labyrinths and the Lady and the whole entire bitchkitty. But I sat there and watched as Felix tamped it all down, and you could tell it hurt him like none other, but he didn't lash out at me, and after a while you could see just knowing was enough to not make him feel so awful. So that was okay. 

Thing is, that was just Felix and Kay, and they both got their place. There was Vanessa, too, and she wasn't half bad when she forgot to act like a twit. But I didn't like her as much as I liked Kay, and she didn't like me as much as she liked Esmer, so she wasn't what you'd call great company. And that's Grimglass: this tiny fuck of a town, and everybody's got their thing except me. 

Which is how I got into telling stories. See, Felix didn't want to think about the Mirador even one little bit, not even the good times, and it's not like I could blame him seeing as how there weren't none. But people still got questions, and a place like Grimglass, you can bet they're going to ask them. 'Cuz, if I ain't hammered this home yet, there ain't much else to do. So Felix's got his papers, and he can wall himself up muttering to 'em, and what're people gonna do except come to me? 

So they came, and they asked, and I told'em. I told them every story I knew, about Porphyria Levant, and Jerico Sun Eyes, and I must've talked till I was blue in the face but people still were asking. So I even told'm about Brinvillier Styrch, and how he'd burned Jane Teveria in the Hall of Chimeras, only to turn around two generations later and come back with this apprentice nobody knew where he'd grabbed from. And how he snuck his way back in and used the kid to break the Virtu, and how when it was done he told everyone the kid had done it, so they threw him in the madhouse and drove him out of the city, and how he had to cross through Kekropia and dodge the Bastion to get his head back right, but once he had he marched right back into the Mirador and fixed things so well you'd never know they'd been broken. Because, if you ain't lived through it, it's a powerful story. 

And probably that would have been it, if it weren't for two things. My own stupid curiosity, and this kid Richard. 

Richard was going to make an okay lord, we'd all figured that out, more or less the same way we'd figured out that Julian was going to make an okay duke. And for both of them that was pretty much on Kay. Saints knew none of the rest of us had half a clue what to do with a kid, but he was alright. He didn’t talk down to them but he didn’t let them off the hook easy, neither, and you could see they knew it and they liked him more for it. He'd let them both listen, when I read to him at Grimglass. Then he got busy, and took Julian with him, and I was sick or reading the same stupid books over and over again and sick of arguing with Felix about what they meant, so it was just me and Richard. And he weren’t interested in magical theory. He’d sit there, his eyes huge and all shades of round, and he’d say, “Tell me a story.” And by then, I was out of stories.

So I did the best I could, and I told him about a war. Because, it didn't take much to see what direction that was headed in, what with the Bastion having spies just about everywhere and me only assuming that the Mirador did, too. And sure, we'd put the lid on the Polydorii plot, but there were bound to be more like it, so long as everything stayed the way it was and there weren't a better heir than Lord Shannon. 

And it's not like I was totally in the dark, because I got these letters. And most ways they weren't too informative -- Rinaldo wrote me a lot, because what else was he going to do, but it was almost all bitching about Simon, and then of course Simon had to tell me his side of it, so I got pages and pages of that. And Mehitabel and me hadn't parted on all bad terms, neither, so sometimes I'd get a letter from her. Hers were the worst, though, nothing in them worth knowing -- and I don't know if that was because of the way we'd left things or just leftover spy business, that she still parcelled up everything in her life and none of the juicy bits were for me. 

The best source, hands down, was Cardenio, so basically what I'm saying is nothing'd changed. And once he found out I could read he started writing me every night, so I'd get these letters that were really twelve to one, little paragraphs scribbled here and there whenever he'd had the time. They didn't always have what Felix'd call a "coherent thought," but they were informative. 

That's how I found out about the baby, or should I say, babies, and that was a story for Richard. The best kind of story, because it started with a wedding. 

That, Mehitabel covered in plenty. She went on for pages and pages about Enid's dress, like that's something I'd care about, but Richard wanted to know, so there was that. The dress, in case you wondered, was gold brocade, embroidered everywhere with lions -- on account of the Teverii, of course. Mehitabel didn't say it outright, but I'd seen Lady Enid and she was pretty enough, but not what you'd call robust. So I'd bet just about anything you wanted that the poor girl looked more like a life sized doll than she did a real live bride, the kind you'd want to kiss and take to bed at the end of the night. But I didn't tell that to Richard. I just told him that the girl married the Lord Protector, and that's about as close as you can get to being queen in the Mirador. 

Especially with Lord Stephen's infamous lover, the actress, out on her rear and none too pleased about it. After _Edith,_ Mehitabel had gone on to do this play called _Malfy_ , and when I heard that Felix went out and found me a copy and I read it. I could see Mehitabel as the duchess, wearing a dress just like the one Lady Enid'd gotten married in, and that was what caused the fight. 'Cuz, in the play, there's this Duchess, and she's widowed, but she loves this guy at court, a steward. And her brothers don't want her to remarry. For one of them it's about money and for the other one it's that he wants to fuck her, and anyways, the guy she's got her eye on is no way appropriate. But she marries him anyway, and then her brothers and all their enemies they set upon her. And finally they drive her mad, but they go just as far in the process, and it's one of those plays where no one lives till the end except one stupid kid, and you just know he ain't gonna make it in the long run, because they ain't done nothing to fix the system. 

If you ever wanted a play you shouldn't do in Melusine, right there beneath the Mirador, it's _Malfy_ , and I didn't need Felix to tell me why. But here's Mehitabel, the Lord Protector's lover, all right and tight and official, and she's doing it dressed like the Lord Protector's fiancee. I guess people thought she was jealous. Which makes no sense, if you know Mehitabel, but they didn't. That's the thing about her, is you only know what she wants you to, and not a word more. 

Either way, she does _Malfy_ , and Enid's humiliated (I got that one from Rinaldo) and you can bet the Lord Protector is so mad he's ready to spit (Simon). But Mehitabel, people love her, and the most Lord Stephen could do was pretend he didn't know what it was all about. But you can bet she moved out of the Mirador that night, and I don't think she got her things delivered by porter, neither. 

So there's Mehitabel, on the outs, and Lord Stephen does the only thing he can to get people's mind off the latest scandal: He tells the whole world Lady Enid's pregnant. Which Felix says he wouldn't do, and I sure wouldn't do. Because you just know it's going to make the crazies come out of the woodwork.

Mehitabel's _Malfy_ ran the whole nine months of Lady Enid's pregnancy, and people kept going to see it, and none of them are too happy with the Mirador because of course on top of that you've got the war. So there's food shortages, worse than normal, and they're rationing, worse than normal, and this came from Cardenio -- he told me you're a procurer of any kind, you're making a killing, but everyone else is just sort of limping around, hoping the Mirador and the Bastion will go back to not giving a fuck about each other and leaving them alone. So you can see how Mehitabel turned into this thing, this kind of people's hero, because she wouldn't put up with crap from either of them, Bastion or Mirador, and she weren't afraid to say it. 

Then Lady Enid has her baby, and it's winter, so things calm down for a while. There's the fever, and it's as bad as ever because people ain't ate in five months, but the armies are back and no one's talking about a draft no more. So Mehitabel retires her _Malfy_ and does this other play, fuck me for a penny if I know what it's called, but it's no big deal the way _Malfy_ was. 

And maybe that's where the story ends. 

But see, I hear things, in between the little bits and pieces I get from Mehitabel and Cardenio and Simon and Rinaldo. Like Mehitabel writes about their new ingenue and how she and that molly boy they'd taken on the season before I left, how they're thick as thieves. Could be long lost siblings. And Rinaldo sends me a portrait of the Lord Protector's family, and it's lovely. You can see Lady Enid all grown into herself, as long as you don't look to hard. And I'm willing to bet people don't, because they want to be comfortable. It's not too comfortable to tell the Lord Protector his wife's got a different nose than she had before she went into seclusion, that her hair don't curl quite the same way. 

And the thing is I probably would have never noticed, 'cept it don’t sound like Mehitabel to kick up a fuss. So I get to thinking, I saw _Edith_ when Mehitabel did it, right before the shit hit the fan and we left Melusine. And don't get me wrong, she did a grand job. It's just that that was right before the Empyrean needed a new ingenue, and you gotta wonder what happened to the old one. 

Now, you can bet I'd told Richard all about Amaryllis Cordelii, and how she'd met her end, so when I got to the part about Lady Enid and the new actress at the Empyrean, he caught on real quick. But he looks at me, his big eyes shining, and he asks the real question, the one this is all tied up in. “What about the baby?” 

Course, it weren't no secret in the lower city that Mehitabel'd been carrying Lord Stephen's bastard when she'd been kicked from the Mirador. I had that straight from Cardenio, and so you knew it had to be true. and I can see as how she wouldn't want to come forward, given the way they'd parted and how fucked the succession already was.

If I was an actress and I was in trouble -- the kind of trouble only girls get into, if you take my meaning -- I don't think you could pay me enough to go near the Mirador and all them crazy hocuses and Lord Stephen. Except I'd said that before and we all know how it turned out. And Cardenio, he says there's a lot of food disappearing into that boarding house where Mehitabel had her room -- which you'd expect, on account of it being a boarding house and all, but you can see as how between Mehitabel and the new girl at the playhouse, they might not be needing quite as many sets of britches as Cardenio said they'd been getting, both in kid sizes and grown-up. And Simon, I’m hearing from him that Mehitabel is stepping out with this new boy, sure not Marathine, and sure not Cabaline neither. It’s Rinaldo who tells me he thinks she’s happy, happier than she was when I was there. Which stings, sure, but it’s nice, too. 

But see, this is the part where I get shaky. I didn't say nothing to Richard, him being the age he is, and not really having any sort of a feel for womens' bodies yet. But in _Malfy_ , the way she dies is a fall. And Kethe, to hear Simon tell it (because he told me, real proud, that he'd seen Mehitabel four times at the Empyrean) they didn't shy away from it. They did this trick with a screen and I guess a mattress or a straw tick, but they lit it from the back and you saw the Dutchess -- that being Mehitabel -- you saw her fall. And it weren't no distance to fuck with, neither. Plus, a belly that size, you wouldn’t think it was a thing you could hide on stage. But Mehitabel, she didn’t miss a single time performing _Malfy_. Not one. 

So I told Richard I didn't know for sure about the baby, just like I didn't know for sure who the man and boy were, eating up all the food in that all-womens' boarding house. Because that's what makes a great story, is that you never know for sure what happened. But if someone told you the truth, you sure as shit wouldn't believe it.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Rosethornli, 
> 
> I'm sorry this isn't exactly what you asked for in your Dear Yuletide letter. I wanted to write you post-Mirador fic, but Mildmay's voice is so strong. I ended up cobbling together the idea of Mildmay's storytelling with a "Where are they now" for the characters in Melusine. When they leave, everything is so tense... I didn't really see how Stephen could keep Mehitabel around, with her being a confessed spy, but on the other hand, things in the Mirador are always so treacherous. I loved the idea of Stephen getting creative to protect his wife, and Mildmay telling it like one of his stories, so I ran with it. I hope you enjoy the fic! 
> 
> Thank you so much for your awesome request, and have a wonderful holidays. 
> 
> Love,  
> Your Yuletide Writer


End file.
